The trope about ending endless wars is really a way of arguing that the US foreign policy establishment has failed, that the supposed doctrine of interventionism is ineffective and counterproductive, and that the United States should retrench, withdraw, and do less in the world. It is the latest talking point in a long-running debate between advocates of restraint and advocates of engagement. The debate is not whether we want wars to end or not, but about what strategy is best suited to end them on the best terms.

Dr. Paul D. Miller is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Dr. Miller is the associate director of the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a distinguished scholar with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and a lecturer at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

As a practitioner, Dr. Miller served as Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff; worked as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency; and served as a military intelligence officer in the US Army, including a deployment to Afghanistan. His most recent book, American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy, was published by Georgetown University Press in 2016. In his first book, Armed State Building (Cornell University Press, 2013), Miller examined the history and strategy of stability operations. Miller taught at the National Defense University and worked at the RAND Corporation prior to arriving at UT-Austin.

Miller blogs on foreign affairs at Elephants in the Room. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Survival, Presidential Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Orbis, the American Interest, the National Interest, the World Affairs Journal, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and elsewhere. Miller holds a PhD in international relations and a BA in government from Georgetown University, and a masters in public policy from Harvard University.

He is a contributing editor of the Texas National Security Review, a contributing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy, a research fellow at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a member of the advisory board for the Philos Project, and a member of the Texas Lyceum.

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